Asia Institute - Research Publications
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ItemLanguage shift and maintenance in the Korean community in Australia(International Journal of Korean Language Education, 2016)
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ItemThe AIIB and China's Normative Power in International Financial Governance Structure(SPRINGER SINGAPORE PTE LTD, 2016-12)
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ItemGenetic evidence for contribution of human dispersal to the genetic diversity of EBA-175 in Plasmodium falciparum.(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2015-08-01)BACKGROUND: The 175-kDa erythrocyte binding antigen (EBA-175) of Plasmodium falciparum plays a crucial role in merozoite invasion into human erythrocytes. EBA-175 is believed to have been under diversifying selection; however, there have been no studies investigating the effect of dispersal of humans out of Africa on the genetic variation of EBA-175 in P. falciparum. METHODS: The PCR-direct sequencing was performed for a part of the eba-175 gene (regions II and III) using DNA samples obtained from Thai patients infected with P. falciparum. The divergence times for the P. falciparum eba-175 alleles were estimated assuming that P. falciparum/Plasmodium reichenowi divergence occurred 6 million years ago (MYA). To examine the possibility of diversifying selection, nonsynonymous and synonymous substitution rates for Plasmodium species were also estimated. RESULTS: A total of 32 eba-175 alleles were identified from 131 Thai P. falciparum isolates. Their estimated divergence time was 0.13-0.14 MYA, before the exodus of humans from Africa. A phylogenetic tree for a large sequence dataset of P. falciparum eba-175 alleles from across the world showed the presence of a basal Asian-specific cluster for all P. falciparum sequences. A markedly more nonsynonymous substitutions than synonymous substitutions in region II in P. falciparum was also detected, but not within Plasmodium species parasitizing African apes, suggesting that diversifying selection has acted specifically on P. falciparum eba-175. CONCLUSIONS: Plasmodium falciparum eba-175 genetic diversity appeared to increase following the exodus of Asian ancestors from Africa. Diversifying selection may have played an important role in the diversification of eba-175 allelic lineages. The present results suggest that the dispersals of humans out of Africa influenced significantly the molecular evolution of P. falciparum EBA-175.
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ItemLaw, democracy and the fulfilment of socioeconomic rights: insights from Indonesia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-02-01)In recent years a debate has emerged about the conditions under which justiciable legal frameworks facilitate the fulfilment of socioeconomic rights. This debate has pitted institutionalist perspectives that emphasise the progressive potential of democratisation against structuralist perspectives that emphasise the constraints imposed by relationships of power and interest. This paper considers the debate in light of Indonesia’s recent experience. It suggests that we need to examine how institutional and structural factors interact within particular contexts to shape socioeconomic rights fulfilment, not examine these factors in isolation. It also considers the strategic implications of this argument for rights proponents.
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ItemNeo-liberalism and the politics of higher education policy in Indonesia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-01)This paper examines Indonesia's experience with neo-liberal higher education reform. It argues that this agenda has encountered strong resistance from the dominant predatory political, military, and bureaucratic elements who occupy the state apparatus, their corporate clients, and popular forces, leading to continuation of the centralist and predatory system of higher education that was established under the New Order. The only areas in which neo-liberal reform has progressed have been those where the neo-liberal agenda has aligned well with that of popular forces and there has been little resistance from predatory elements. In presenting this argument, the paper illustrates the role of domestic configurations of power and interest in mediating global pressures for neo-liberal higher education reform. It accordingly suggests that Indonesia needs to construct a model of higher education that simultaneously fits with the reigning political settlement and produces better research and teaching outcomes than the present model.
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ItemAsia's rise and the politics of Australian aid policy(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016-01-01)
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ItemAdaptation science and policy in China's agricultural sector(WILEY, 2016-09-01)In recent years, China's central government has begun to articulate its adaptation policy and to identify measures to adapt the nation's agriculture to changing precipitation patterns, higher temperatures, and extreme events. These developments are occurring at a time when the agricultural sector is in flux: while the major grain crops—rice, wheat, and corn—are still central to food security, many smallholder farmers have shifted away from land‐intensive production to growing higher‐value, labour‐intensive horticultural products, such as fruit and vegetables. In addition, new forms of agriculture are emerging because of out‐migration and land transfers. This review introduces the adaptation policy context for agricultural adaptation in China and reviews existing research on impacts and adaptation. It then discusses how well existing research and policy actually reflect the challenges of adapting China's farms to climate change. Four issues are discussed which together suggest that current science and policy very poorly reflect challenges on the ground: the framing of agriculture as a relatively homogeneous sector; the absence of any vulnerability assessments attuned to local contexts; a bias toward large‐scale engineering solutions; and insufficient consideration of local government capacity. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:693–706. doi: 10.1002/wcc.414 This article is categorized under: Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Learning from Cases and Analogies
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ItemGovernmentality and the conduct of water: China's South-North Water Transfer Project(WILEY, 2016-10)Governmentality is a way of thinking about dispersed practices of governing, including attempts to render space governable. China's South–North Water Transfer (SNWT) project, the world's largest interbasin water transfer project, is a programme of government that attempts to render the distribution of water across space more governable and administrable. This article analyses English and Chinese academic, media and government documents through a governmentality lens. It aims to examine the SNWT project's machinery, mentality and spatiality, including its narrative, its constitution of objects and subjects in space, its multiple techniques of government, and its physical and administrative assemblages. In decentring the problem of the state in relation to the SNWT project we can learn much about both the politics of water and the nature of Chinese governmentalities. This article shows how the SNWT naturalises water scarcity, normalises the pre‐eminence of North China, sustains engineering over regulatory solutions and reconfigures hydrosocial relations, while also outlining the limits to and endemic conflicts within this vast programme of government.
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ItemAustralia’s ‘Asian Century’: Time, Space and Public Culture(Japan Focus, 2015-02-10)In this essay we consider ongoing public-cultural discussions about Australia’s situation in ‘the Asian century’ as symptomatic of a conjunctural moment in Australian social life: a historical phase that is given distinctive shape by the convergence of the discourses of paranoid nationalism and free-market (inter)nationalism. We argue that the co-existence of these two (deeply contradictory) imaginaries as the dominant available rubrics for configuring ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’ in relation to each other results in a profoundly impoverished understanding of current conditions. We propose that an account of some very differently configured relationships between ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ drawn from people’s material experiences of everyday cultural life, can provide resources for those interested in thinking beyond the hyperbole of economic opportunism and the paralysis of paranoid nationalism. We begin by briefly considering ostensibly progressive innovations in governmental and public-cultural framings of the Asia-Australia relationship since the late twentieth century–– ‘Asia as market’ and ‘Asia literacy’––before turning to some stories that we argue offer much richer resources. These stories include our remembered experiences of late 20th-century Australian children’s media––always-already infused with a certain Japanese flavor. We also consider the contemporary translocal experiences of Asian Australians, Chinese international students in Australian cities, and Asian-Australian media and research collaborations. Such phenomena, we argue, constitute Australian social life as translocal and inter-cultural, thereby fundamentally challenging the presumed radical separateness of ‘Australia’ from ‘Asia’ on which currently dominant framings of Australia’s situation in the ‘Asian century’ are founded.
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